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VMware¶
VMware (ESXi / vSphere) is the canonical proprietary enterprise hypervisor. Full-featured device emulation, mature PCI passthrough + vGPU, tightly integrated with Nvidia's vGPU licensing model. Wiki appearance here is a reference / wiki-touchpoint page.
Seen in (wiki)¶
- Fly.io's Nvidia-suggested-but-rejected hypervisor. Per sources/2025-02-14-flyio-we-were-wrong-about-gpus: "We could have shipped GPUs very quickly by doing what Nvidia recommended: standing up a standard K8s cluster to schedule GPU jobs on … Alternatively, we could have used a conventional hypervisor. Nvidia suggested VMware (heh)." The "(heh)" is load-bearing — VMware was institutionally rejected at Fly.io as incompatible with the Fly-Machines-fast-boot product posture and the open-source-Rust-stack engineering culture. (Source: sources/2025-02-14-flyio-we-were-wrong-about-gpus)
Why it matters (wiki context)¶
- VMware is, along with QEMU, the other foot of Nvidia's driver happy path. For a multi-tenant platform willing to accept VMware's operational and licensing model, this is the turnkey GPU-virtualization path. Fly.io's explicit rejection is the wiki's datum that "turnkey on VMware" is not the same as "turnkey on a micro-VM-shaped platform".
Related¶
- systems/qemu — the open-source-friendly alternative on Nvidia's happy path.
- systems/intel-cloud-hypervisor / systems/firecracker — the Rust micro-VM stack Fly.io uses instead.
- systems/fly-machines — where the rejection happened.
- concepts/nvidia-driver-happy-path — VMware sits on it.